You are thinking that no one is possibly FOR human trafficking (HT). Maybe people assume it is far, far away from their world or they don't think at all. Only scum like pimps and johns and exploiters and kidnappers and other kinds of lowlife are really FOR trafficking of human beings.
You and Bryan Colbourne, your fellow co-chair on the HT advisory committee of the Oregon Center for Christian Values, are working on a draft of your committee's Action Plan. You've been tasked to put together the section on biblical justice.
You think about that. If no one is FOR HT, why does it even exist? Sure, you've heard vague and pitiful stories from exotic places like Southeast Asia and Africa and occasionally some hint of it here in America with women being smuggled in from foreign countries, right? American women, aren't they into prostitution for the kicks or because they need money? At least that is what people assume. Sad that underage girls get caught up in it, too, but they can always leave that scene -- this is a free country after all. Maybe we do need to rescue them, get them cleaned up and headed in the right direction and everything will be fine. Or so people think.
What is HT anyway? You need a definition for your document, so you go online and you find a couple of helpful explanations. One is from the United Nations, which makes it automatically suspect to some people, but the wording is still useful, so maybe you can call it an "internationally accepted definition": "the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation." Wordy, but its full-court solid.
Next you go to the ultimate source of all knowledge, Wikipedia. There in simpler English, it says HT is "people being tricked, lured, coerced or forced to work with no or low payment or on terms that are highly exploitative." It's considered trade or commerce in people, which has many features of slavery, doesn't require transportation or border-crossing. Victims of HT ... Whoa, stop the presses. There's the key word -- VICTIMS. These people are victims of a crime. Slavery, crime, victims. The words keep coming ... "prostitution, forced labor (including bonded labor or debt bondage) and other forms of involuntary service" -- and also "the sale of babies and children for adoption or other purposes." Whew.
Victims. Not prostitutes. Not laborers. And not just little kids. Cradle to grave, these people, every last one of them, are victims of greed. When the trafficker looks at these human beings, he (why is it always a "he"?) doesn't see persons, individuals. All he sees are dollar signs, like stuff you buy at Wal-Mart for 5 bucks and trade on E-Bay for 500.
HT exists because there is a market for the product. The product happens to be humans or, more precisely, human bodies or parts thereof. Lots of pretty girls and some pretty boys, too. But also human machines, little kids or adults that can make clothes or provide kidneys or farm fields or do really cheap labor because you and I assume they are better off than they would be otherwise. 27 million of them according to those that count such things, but nobody really knows. Because it is all underground. Out of sight. Often right under our noses, like right here in God-love-it America and super-sophisticated Portland.
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